New design of Learn with Locals

Memrise Bug Control Memrise Labs
1

For the first time tonight I’ve seen the new version of the “Learn with locals” exercise on the Browser app.

On my computer, the videos are slightly smaller than before. I’m not sure yet if this is a good change or not. Audio is more important so it’s no big deal if the video is smaller, on the other hand this is the only exercise that contains videos, so what’s the point of making these videos smaller?

We’ve lost the button to skip the audio that repeats the answer after we clicked on it. At first I didn’t like this change but I agree the old behaviour was clunky.

When we have to select between 4 choices, sometimes I see the answers written in the target language (I’m pretty sure that in the previous version, answers were never written in the target language). In my opinion it’s an excellent thing, and just for this reason I’m going to keep on using this version.

The Play Again button (i.e. the Play button to watch the video again) is nicer than before. This was not really an issue but I prefer the new one anyway.

We no longer have the flower pot and the plant growing. I don’t really miss this animation since I barely paid attention to it.

I have keyboard issues, just like the new version of Speed Review (I assume the problem is due to some code that is used in both new versions). More exactly, I can hit the 1/2/3/4 key and it selects the answer, but my browser (Firefox) catches the keyboard event as well. This does not happen with the old version, meaning that I can press a key, it selects the answer but my web browser does not catch the keyboard event.

The top bar more shiny than before but I don’t really mind (unless Speed Review where I think that it draws unnecessary attention). It’s nice to see the score next to the bar.

Talking about scores, the current UI fails at showing me the total score. Previously when the exercise ended, I had a summary screen which showed my total score and invited me to do another exercise. Now when it ends, I come back to the main page of Memrise: no score summary, and no exercise invitation.

I really miss the exercise invitation. It’s boring to get back to the main screen every time, especially since it takes a few seconds to load (and my network connection is blazing fast so I assume the servers are to blame).

I suppose the score summary will be added in the future. Or at least I hope it will. I would suggest to create an animation that picks the score (located on the top right) and moves it to the center of the screen, then adds the score to the current score (with an animation of growing score) which ultimately shows the total score.

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You caught it before we announced! We’ll be doing a full post when we’ve pushed some new changes, but there’s a few things that I wanted to reply to here…

  1. The video size - I agree. We’re actually working on changing the layout to more of a ‘side by side’ like the presentation card. I think it’s a better use of the size of the screen and should work nicely.
  2. The button to skip - This is actually coming back! We’ll have the button AND the auto-advance, so if you don’t want to listen and want to move on you can quickly press the button (or press enter) and skip to the next screen
  3. :thinking: I’ll have to check, but I think we’ve always had both. If not, we definitely have on our mobile apps, so want to put them in on web. It’s good to be able to test yourself on both translating the item and recognising the item, especially when it sounds different to how it’s written (or it’s in a completely different script!)
  4. The flower is coming back, and we’ll be adding ignore and mark as difficult to these tests as well, although not straight away. Personally, I think the flower is a bit out of date now and needs updating at some point, but for now it’s our best metaphor for how the item plants and then grows in your memory
  5. the keyboard issues - we’re already looking into this :slight_smile:
  6. the ‘end of session’ screen - The screen that has your points and the ‘next session prompt’… this is coming (it’s the next thing we’re working on) and will be put in for both Speed Review and Learn with Locals (as well as other modes as we release)
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Thank you for your reply. I’m looking forward to seeing those improvements.

About the texts in the target language, I’ve deactivated the Memrise Labs in order to check if my memory was correct, and I haven’t seen in single multiple-choice quizz containing answers written in the target language, not a single one in about 30 questions or so. So either I was very unlucky, either it was never the case (at least not in the Browser app).

A couple more things I noticed.

  1. the video is now in the middle of the screen (previously the video was slightly higher and the answers were in the middle). I think this is wanted because the old design wasted quite some space in the bottom of the screen, however I liked the fact that the answers were centered because they are, IMO, the main thing you should be looking at.

  2. the answers now have variable heights, as shown here https://i.imgur.com/Mou36jk.png ; in the previous version, answers always had the same height two by two (1+2 and 3+4) so if the 1st and 2nd answers had a different height, the highest height was displayed for both choices. I think it was visually more appealing.

  3. in the new version I’ve seen exclusively multiple-choice quizzes, whereas the previous version asked sometimes to write the text in full. I don’t know if this is intended. I assume the text-based questions will come back later after they’ve been reworked.

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Points 2 and 3 are being worked on right now! :slight_smile:
And to give you an idea, here’s the design for what we’re aiming for when we properly release to Labs in the next week (caveat this is the design version, so it’ll likely have some slight differences to what gets coded)

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3001440×1024 145 KB

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@lurkmoophy I can see this new design and I think it’s much better.

However the keys react to the old grid layout, meaning that if I have the focus on anwser 1 and I press the Down Arrow key, I end up at answer 3 instead of answer 2. Needless to say, it just melts my brain, thus I force myself to use the mouse until it’s fixed.

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LOL, never came across this one! :smiley:

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Ha! Definitely a bug. I’ll raise.

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Hey there!

This one really annoyed me too so I’ve fixed it and deployed the change to production.

James at Memrise

P.S. If you feel really speedy, you can use J to go down, K to go up, H to go left and L to go right. This saves you from having to move your fingers down to the arrows all the time. We’ll be adding a list of the full set of keyboard shortcuts available soon!

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@jamesmulholland thank you for fixing the Arrow keys, it works like a charm now!

The HJKL keys do not work for me, though. I already have the bug of the number keys, i.e. when I press a key, it picks the answer but also starts typing in my browser. For HJKL it starts typing but it does not move the cursor.

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Are you trying the lowercase letters (i.e. without pressing shift)? Sorry if my instructions above were a little confusing.

I’m not quite sure what you mean by ‘typing in my browser’ as this shortcut is currently only on pages without text inputs. We also use some code that should stop keyboard shortcuts clashing with input boxes. Are you sure you are on the Learn With Locals mode with Memrise Labs turned on?

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Yes the Memrise Labs option is turned on.

I tried lowercase/uppercase (with or without Shift, with or without Caps Lock) with no effect.

When I say “typing in my browser” I mean the Firefox option to search text as soon as I start typing.

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I just started and still can’t use the website. I’m a Thai person who wants to learn English and Korean. I hope Memrise can help guide and teach me… Thank you very much.

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Hi Nicky and welcome to MemRise (leaning and the Forum).

It would help @MemriseSupport if you could explain your problems and what you are trying to do.

Have you tried the App?

Screen shots always help.

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Hi @nicky1980041918. Unfortunately, these language pairs are not currently available on official Memrise courses.

You may wish to search for community-created courses in the language you are looking for.

Please note that community-created courses have been removed from the “Search” function within the Memrise Mobile App, however, you can still access them on our website (https://app.memrise.com/). You can also continue learning community-created courses in the Memrise mobile app. Simply start a course on web, and it will be available in the app as well.

I hope this helps. Please let us know if there’s anything else we can help you with :slightly_smiling_face:

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